Showing results by narrator "Natalie" in All Categories

Joanie Bigbee, cupcake baker extraordinaire, likes to keep her options open - and she's good at it. She's started and sold some 30 businesses in her postage stamp-sized Tennessee town, and at the moment she can be found in a short skirt and go-go boots, selling cupcakes out of the back of a converted Volkswagen van. What she moves on to next is anybody's guess. She knows better than to be tied down. In any way. She's watched every woman in her family fall head-over-heels, only to find herself wondering how to pick up the pieces when love is lost.

Clover: The man may be my brother's new second in command, but to me, Joshua's just the bossy pain in the ass who's way too good at getting under my skin. To be fair, I suppose my less-than-sunny disposition when he's around can take some of the credit for provoking him. I can't help it. He's the pack's alpha cat—a hulking, hot mountain lion shifter, and thus the bane of my existence on principle. Cats and I, we don't mix.

A no-nonsense governess returns to the family home at Christmas to celebrate the season and an upcoming wedding but learns of a curse affecting the men of the family. 'At Chrighton Abbey' is taken from the Victorian Anthologies series featuring short stories by classic writers of the spooky, the scary and the supernatural. Guaranteed to give you the shivers, each collection includes familiar and loved creepy tales as well as those less well-known.

When feature writer Ruth Finlay and her elderly neighbor Doris Cleaver visit an antique and collectibles market in the small town of Myrtle Bay, they get a lot more than they bargained for. After Ruth's old tennis coach is found dead, they discover that there's no lack of people who harbor a grudge against the victim, and a tangled web of family ties and lies begins to unravel. But can Ruth and Doris find the killer in time to avert a second murder?

Lily Frazer would do anything to save the Frazer Center for the Arts - even take on the infamous billionaire Calder Cunningham. When Lily breaks onto the Cunningham estate, she only wants to find and reason with Calder. (All right, all right, she wants to punch him in the face, too, but that's Plan B.) As it turns out, the arrogant billionaire is willing to give her the money he promised, but there's a catch: she must win it from him. And the games he has in mind aren't exactly... innocent.

With Celadon fighting on the political front against the ruthless High Queen Riadne—now armed with the cataclysmic power of her Crown, the Sins, and Ruin—Vehan and Aurelian are scrambling in secret to build an army to rival the Riadne’s infernal forces. Meanwhile, Nausicaä will do whatever it takes to save her girlfriend from obliteration, despite knowing the odds of survival are nearly nonexistent. When the line between hero and villain becomes blurred, and bonds are put to the ultimate test, it has never been more imperative—or more difficult—to stand united.

As a descendant of the Chinese god of medicine, Elle was destined to be a doctor. Instead, she’s underemployed as a magical calligrapher at the fairy temp agency. She and her older brother are in hiding from their younger brother, who seeks their deaths to gain their god’s favor. Safety means an order of invisibility with a side of no attachments at the No Fun Allowed store. Elle only relaxes around her client Luc, to whom she’s gotten attached. Oops.

Daniel Abe, a young doctor in Chicago, is finally coming back to Hawai'i. He has his own reason for returning to his childhood home, but it is not to revisit the past, unlike his Uncle Koji. Koji lives with the memories of Daniel’s mother, Mariko, the love of his life, and the scars of a life hard-lived. He can’t wait to see Daniel, who he’s always thought of as a son, but he knows the time has come to tell him the truth about his mother, and his father.

Harlow Torrent, part-time journalist and full-time Slip Witch has a new job working on the set of Bella Bing's latest movie, filming in Harlot Bay. It's meant to be a change of pace but when the lead actor, Mattias Matterhorn, dies on his first day on set, Harlow is pulled into a dangerous plot. A saboteur is on set and they'll do anything to shut the film down... including murder.

Darcy Evans is getting married. In a week. To a man who is her childhood dream come true. But a late-night confession from her best friend changes everything and before she even has time to unpack it, she must endure a road trip to the ceremony with her estranged mother, Marja. It was always the two of them against the world...until Marja ghosted Darcy three years ago. No car in the world has enough room for all of their baggage.

Postcolonial Love Poem is a thunderous river of a book. It demands that every body carried within - bodies of language, land, suffering brothers, enemies and lovers - be touched and held. Where the bodies of indigenous, Latinx, Black and Brown women are simultaneously the body politic and the body ecstatic. In claiming this autonomy of desire, language is pushed to its dark edges, the astonishing dune fields and forests where pleasure and love are both grief and joy, violence and sensuality.

Hunter Yee has perfect aim with a bow and arrow, but all else in his life veers wrong. He’s sick of being haunted by his family’s past mistakes. The only things keeping him from running away are his little brother, a supernatural wind, and the bewitching girl at his new high school. Luna Chang dreads the future. Graduation looms ahead, and her parents’ expectations are stifling. When she begins to break the rules, she finds her life upended by the strange new boy in her class, the arrival of unearthly fireflies, and an ominous crack spreading across the town of Fairbridge.

What does it take to have a long writing life? Drawing on her years of writing, teaching, and practicing Zen, Natalie Goldberg shares the experiences that have opened her to new ways of being alive - experiences that point the way forward in our lives and our writing. The "great spring" of this book title refers to the great rush of energy that arrives when you think no life will ever come again - the early yellow flowering forsythia, for example.

Celebrating the 100th anniversary of the first issues of Weird Tales Magazine, 100 Years of Weird is a masterful compendium of new and classic stories, flash fiction, essays, and poems from the giants of speculative fiction, including R. L. Stine, Laurell K. Hamilton, Ray Bradbury, H. P. Lovecraft, Tennessee Williams, and Isaac Asimov.

Meg Dawson and the rest of the Morrisey residents can’t handle anymore surprises in their beloved downtown Seattle apartment building. So, when Meg finds a secret staircase leading down to the famous Seattle Underground, she’s tempted to turn back. The area was supposed to be closed off long ago. But turning back isn’t so easy when she stumbles on not one, but two bodies in the hidden space. And even though the two deaths are separated by a century, the victims have more in common than Meg first realizes.

Early in life Belle Sorensen discovers the world is made only for men. They own everything: jobs, property, wives. But Belle understands what few others do: where women are concerned, men are weak. A woman unhampered by scruples can take from them what she wants. And so Belle sets out to prove to the world that a woman can be just as ruthless, black-hearted and single-minded as any man. Starting with her long suffering husband, Mads, Belle embarks on a killing spree the like of which has never been seen before nor since.

Harlow Torrent, part-time journalist and full-time slip witch is hot on the trail of an arsonist. But who is behind the deadly fires? Someone working for their own evil ends or a fire spirit acting according to its nature? Or perhaps a magical power hidden away?

We have always created and destroyed monsters. They give form to what we don't wish to know or understand; to our anxieties and irrational terrors. They have helped us manage the extraordinary complexity of our minds and deal with the challenges of being human. In Enchanted Creatures, Natalie Lawrence delves into the dark histories of creatures we have imagined over 15,000 years of history: from strange beasts carved in Palaeolithic caves and hybrid snake women, to deep-sea leviathans and apocalyptic dino-monsters.

For socialite Robin Lear, being handcuffed in the back of a police car for a bogus crime is the cherry on top of the worst week ever. First, her father announces devastating news. Then, in a fit of tough love, he demotes Robin from her cushy job in the family business and reassigns her to work for an insufferable manager. Now, for the first time in her life, Robin will have to earn her place in the world - and the sexy new contractor renovating her house may be just the man to show her how.

Gina "Tinkerbell" Miyoko is not your typical private eye. Armed with a baby blue Magnum, a Harley blessed with Holy Water by her dramatically disposed mother, and a Japanese mingei tucked in her pocket (a good luck charm from her Sherlock Holmes-obsessed father), Tink spends her time sniffing out delinquent dads in the San Francisco Bay area and honing her detective skills. But when her best friend, Rose, an undercover agent, discovers there’s a stalker on her tail, she hires Tink as a bodyguard.